This invention relates to ammunition magazines and more specifically to magazines for dispensing uniformly-sized spherical projectiles such as frangible paintballs into a gun adapted to shoot said projectiles.
The ever-increasing popularity of war games in which frangible paintballs are shot to mark a living target, has prompted many improvements designed to enhance the rapid and sustained firing of a large quantity of projectiles. The most recent models of paintball guns incorporate substitutable paintball hoppers or magazines that mount above a feeding port in the upper section of the gun. These hoppers or magazines usually have a funnel-shaped floor that urge the paintball toward an outlet port located in the lowermost area of the magazine. As the magazine can hold hundreds of projectiles, their cumulative weight can cause jamming at the outlet port.
A variety of anti-jamming mechanisms has been offered by the prior art They include motor-driven disk agitators such as the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,282,454 Bell et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,305,367 Kotsiopoulos et al. Electrical vibrators such as the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,418,919 and Publication No. US. 2002/0096163, both from Perrone have also been proposed. Some magazines feature auger-like feeding devices like the one shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,415,781 Perrone. Almost all containers feature a concave floor as was earlier taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,166,457 Lorenzetti. This last patent also taught the use of an incline channel in order to more effectively direct the projectiles toward the outlet port.
The instant invention results from attempts to avoid the bulky and complex feeding mechanisms of the prior art and to provide a more reliable anti-jamming approach for paintball hoppers.
The principal and secondary objects of this invention are to provide a simple, lightweight paintball hopper in which the projectiles are constantly fed to an outlet port in an orderly and jam-free operation by relying on the special geometry of the paintball container and the optional use of a simple agitator. These and other valuable objects are achieved by using a container having a generally ovoidal shape in which a channel commensurate with the size of the paintball is formed in the floor from a distal end and downwardly toward a outlet port in a median, lowermost portion of the magazine floor. The proximal half of the magazine floor defines a platform that extends above and beyond the outlet port in order to minimize competition of paintballs as they move toward the distal part of the channel from which they can conveniently roll in a single line under the distal edge of the platform and into the outlet port. A short helicoidal stirring arm can be used occasionally to release jamming of the paintballs. The arm projects obliquely and upwardly from the distal edge of the platform above the exposed part of the channel and is driven counter-clockwise, that is in a ball uplifting motion that prevents jamming by an electrical motor manually controllable by a switch mounted on the side of the hopper. The outlet port extends into a tubular section which has a series of radial fins. When the tubular section is forcedly inserted into the projectile inlet port of the gun, the fins resiliently compress to provide a close fitting regardless of any slight deviation between the mating part of the tubular section and the gun inlet port. Space between the fins provide a convenient escape for gases that may have accumulated in the inlet port of the gun. A filling port is provided in an upper portion of the container.